When to Avoid Using Colours in Excel

• 1 min read

Like me, you have no doubt seen some colourful Excel files. One task that colour is used for is to mark rows so they can be reviewed. In general, please avoid applying colours manually when marking rows for review. Instead use a code in a separate column.

In the example below we have a sales data set. We need to mark a few rows for review.

Rather than changing the colour of a row add a column to the table and place an x or other letter in the new Review column to identify the rows to review.

If you want to highlight the rows with a different colour you could use a conditional format that automates the format

You could apply different colours using different codes.

This provides much more flexibility if you need to perform calculations on the marked rows.

The SUMIFS, COUNTIFS and other …IFS functions can be used to provide summaries of the marked rows.

Performing those calculations with just colours is very difficult.